From one of his most creative periods, leading the Vibration Society — Ron Burton, Dick Griffin, Jerome Cooper and co — through one-of-a-kind, freewheeling, radiant wonders like The Inflated Tear (about his going blind) and Volunteered Slavery. Stevie’s My Cherie Amour pops up, trailering next year’s Blacknuss LP.
Kirk called it all ‘black classical music’.

Originally released by Gallo in 1974, this is a raw, impassioned, stunning set led by bop pianist Kirk Lightsey (a regular sideman for Chet Baker) and saxophonist Rudolph Johnson (from Black Jazz), on a break from touring South Africa with Detroit crooner Lovelace Watkins.
A heavy-duty excursion into post-Coltrane spiritual modernism, ranging from the modal, cerebral intensity of the side-long title track Habiba, to the downhome breakbeat groove of There It Is, and the dark glitter of minor-key waltz Fresh Air. Long one of the most desired global jazz LPs, and never before available outside South Africa, Habiba is a forgotten masterpiece of its era.

Improvisations on the organs of three English churches: John the Baptist in Snape, St Edmond’s in Bromeswell, and the Union Chapel Church in Islington, London.

The Estonian pianist Kristjan Randalu — ‘dazzling’, says Herbie — alongside US guitarist Ben Monder and Finnish drummer Markku Ounaskari for his ECM debut, combining a jazzy lyricism with a classical sense of form.

With David Finck and Joey Barton, and Joe Lovano guesting.

Encapsulating the culmination of a joyously ambitious twelve-day jazz project mounted in 1978 at the ancient amphitheatre Tasso della Quercia, in Rome: the collaboration (in different group configurations) between key Italian avant-gardists like the saxophonists Tommaso Vittorini, Eugenio Colombo and Maurizio Giammarco, trumpeter Alberto Corvini and trombonist Danilo Terenzi, together with visiting players such as Steve Lacy, Steve Potts and Evan Parker, Roswell Rudd, Frederick Rzewski and Noel McGhee.

Utterly captivating settings for soprano and alto saxophone — Lacy and Steve Potts terrifically on song — of Georges Braques’ bons mots. With Irene Aebi.
Recorded in 1979 by Jef Gilson.
The first CvsD re-release of Lacy’s full Hat Hut oeuvre, mastered from the original tapes.

On fire, live in Zurich in 1983.

From 1986: half Lacy’s stuff — including Wickets — half Monk’s, including a great In Walked Bud. Oliver Johnson and Jean-Jacques Avenal make a superb rhythm section, pulsating, bristling, always moving on; Steve Potts squalls and testifies like a post-Trane trooper; Lacy is a livewire, darting and alight. Don’t potter off before before the finale, As Usual: it’s triumphant.

Soprano saxophone; traditional Japanese percussion. ‘Something quite different… A simultaneous atmosphere of interaction and independence. I can’t say that I’ve heard anything else like it,’ says John Corbett.

‘Performed in Berlin at the Haus am Waldsee in July, 1985, it was every bit the chamber concert — super intimate and interactive, gorgeously recorded by FMP’s Jost Gebers in an ideal acoustic room. Rather than alternate between one and the other, Lacy and Parker explore middle-terrain the whole time, perhaps skewing a tad more Lacy’s funky-tuneful direction, becoming a single soprano entity made of fragments of sound sometimes accreting into perfectly imperfect lines. Two long tracks, Full Scale and Relations, are completed by a final four-minute coda aptly titled Twittering. Indeed, the whole program has the joyous interactivity of Paul Klee’s painting Twittering Machine: birds aligned on a line, proposing and picking up lines, nothing cruel or mean-spirited, free play all a graceful twitter.’